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April 4 cafe – Argentine Ants

Argentine Ants, the super-colony beneath our feet

with Jenna Florio

Wednesday April 4, 2018 at 7:00 PM

Restaurant Valparaiso, 1403 Solano Ave. Albany

A single ant colony from Argentina has now filled almost six hundred miles of California’s coastline creating something called a super colony. Learn about the surprising behavior of these ants and the research being done on them here at UC Berkeley. Also discover the unseen world of insects right below your feet using ongoing citizen science projects and learn why ants are the perfect “gateway bug” to get the public interested in science.

Argentine ants Photo: Alex Wild

Jenna Florio

Jenna Florio is a Research Assistant at the California Academy of Sciences where she develops projects in collaboration with the Tsutsui Lab at UC Berkeley for the public and scientists to work together on backyard insect populations. She has studied the social behavior of spiders in the jungles of Costa Rica, the migrating behavior of malaria mosquitos, and loves both insects and humans enough to inspire her current work on keeping ants out of your kitchen.